WHY CHIKE’S TWEET SHOULD NOT BE HELD AT FACE VALUE
Yesterday, January 4, 2021, Nigerian singer and songwriter Chike whose alias is named after his wonderful album ‘Boo of the booless’, took to his Twitter page to declare how extremely primitive it is for people to travel to the east just because it is Christmas or a festive period. He stated that the roads are just too dangerous and busy. His tweet received a backlash of insults and degrading words from his followers and a lot of people on Twitter yesterday.
Even though people’s reactions were mixed, Majority of people tweeted that he should have never written such tweet considering that he accepts gigs from the east, and also because as his name suggests, he is an Easterner. But should his tweet be taken at face value?
Yes and No
Yes because a lot of people who travel to the East during festive period only do so once in a year as most of them live in other parts of the country, and it is only within that period that they get to see their relatives. Even if it is totally inconvenient, they try to do this because family is just too important to ignore. Therefore, several people who did this might have been extremely offended by his tweet. But to be honest, the backlash he received was not worth it at all.
A lot of times when people say something that hurts others, especially when such person has not done it before, it is usually for a very painful or tangible reason. But most times, we humans don’t want to understand that. We are quick to come to conclusions and label other people bad once they make a mistake, no matter the good they’ve doing.
It would have been terrible, if Chike had not apologized, but seeing as a lot of people were offended by what he said, he took to his account again to apologize and reveal that two of his friends died on their way back from the East that morning. Losing a friend is terrible, but losing two friends is painful, just too painful.
Even at that, a lot of people didn’t want to understand and even went to the extent of deleting his songs from their phones and proceeded to un-follow him on his social media accounts.
All being said, people make mistakes, and the pressure we put on celebrities is just too much. We want them to be perfect, to say what we would like them to say, sing what we like them to sing and do everything we deem right. It seems as though they are not humans and are entirely different species from us.
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In fact, nowadays, it is so easy to see someone on Twitter saying a singer’s song is terrible, or that they should stop flaunting their relationships on social media, when in actual reality, the singer’s song might not be terrible and they flaunt themselves on social media without giving a damn. We need to stop the negative attitude towards ourselves if we love people only when they don’t make mistakes, then the love we profess is conditional. We are humans, we make mistakes. But the humane thing to do after making mistakes, is to try to correct it. Chike corrected his mistakes, and as humans, forgiveness shouldn’t be too difficult when mistakes are unavoidable.
We are part of something way better.
We all say bad things at a point of grieve, I saw his apology and can say he was just so sincere. Travelling at festive period are whole lots of risk, cos there are many travellers and the road seems to get a whole lot heavy. But here we are in Nigeria, ready to criticise and badmouth anyone.